Hyper-V climbs into Windows

The software giant’s virtualisation technology, originally codenamed Viridian, should have been bundled with Microsoft's latest server product which was released in February.

But a number of “challenges and bugs” in Hyper-V forced the company to postpone its release date by a significant margin, even though – prior to launch – Microsoft had bigged up the technology as a major component of Windows Server 2008.

In February, virtualisation market leader VMWare made hay from Microsoft’s misfortune by signing a number of deals with OEMs including Hewlett-Packard and Dell to ship machines pre-installed with its software.

By March, despite Hyper-V remaining in beta, Microsoft managed to tie up pre-install agreements with HP, Dell, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, among others, all of whom planned to load Hyper-V on their servers.

Today, Microsoft broke the seal on Hyper-V, which has been designed to allow people to run multiple virtual machines on a single machine, by finally releasing it to manufacturers.

Microsoft will be patting itself on the back, though. It had pencilled in mid-August as the rough date when the software would finally land – so by its reckoning Hyper-V has come two months early to market. ®